Dirty Tricks

The article shown at dirty tricks is a very sad reflection on today's business environment. Although this story comes from the USA, we have had experiences of similar misfortune in the UK. Over the years, we have helped clients who have had their money stolen, websites stolen, domain name ownership stolen (that happens a lot - do you really own yours?) and businesses wrecked by so-called service providers in the ICT and Web design fields.

Now, I'm sure this happens in other fields of business (take the car industry and MG Rover for instance - see Robert Peston's cringing review of that story here - BMW Rover), but the software industry seems to attract these characters in greater numbers than are the norm.

The moral of the story is simple - be careful who you choose as a supplier of whatever service you need. Get a specification and tender document written by someone who knows the field. At the end of any tender evaluation that we carry out for clients, where a 'winner' has emerged from a quantitative analysis, we always ask the question "Can you work with these people?"

Always visit their premises, ask awkward questions about their culture and check references. What are they really like? Every company has problems, but the good ones react well when something goes wrong - how do they react? Do they look for scapegoats or do they fix the problem and learn from it?

The supplier may well be the leader in the market or have provided the cheapest bid, but if he has the business ethics of Attila the Hun, I'd rather not do business with him.

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